State of the art cellular communications networks such as e.g. UMTS or LTE networks provide handover mechanisms requiring a certain amount of signalling on the air interface between terminals and serving base stations. In future wireless networks, e.g. fifth generation (5G) networks, small data packet services will be used more frequently. These services, in contrast to broadband services, typically have a low data rate and/or are non-real time and delay-tolerant and/or cause sporadic traffic. As a result, signaling messages over the air interface between radio access nodes (e.g. base stations) and terminals (e.g. user terminals), as well as signaling messages towards a mobility management entity (MME) or the like dominate the available radio resources. For efficient use of radio resources within future wireless networks there is thus a need to reduce the number of signaling messages related to small data packet services.